We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

I'm pretty sure it means that if we shovel even more money into "the schools" [as opposed to "into teacher/administrator salaries and benefits"] then all those test scores will start improving dramatically real darn soon now.

What a shame. It truely doesn't need to be this way. With the money we put into our public education system we could have the best in the world. Even a much lesser goal of giving a world class education to all students capable and willing to do what it takes to get one would be easy. And for those students without the ability or willingness to excel we could assure that they get no worse then they get today. But instead we choose a politically correct homogeneous education where very few students excel and most simply vote are pushed through 12 years and if they are lucky they absorb something along the way.

With the money we put into our public education system we could have the best in the world.

I disagree. If the business model is flawed, it wouldn't matter how much money you threw at it, it still wouldn't work and that's what we have in public education. The only people who are as culpable as the education establishment are parents are trained like circus seals to ignore that the government only pretends to educate their kids and (even though they may have moved into a neighborhood so their kids could attend a particular school) to sit still every summer while the government decides which school their kids will actually attend.

I'm not sure you disagree. Perhaps you simply didn't understand my point. My point is there is a lot of money being spent on public education,more then enough. With that money and intelligent and sane people directing the use of that money we COULD have the best schools in the world.
Almost every decision made by the bureaucrats in public education is aimed at improving teachers benefits and not at improving students education. Many of the simple things we could do to improve education are dismissed because of PC considerations. If we adopted a single change in our philosophy towards public education we would excel. That change would be to put the education of the students first, period.

I'll admit to being a bit provocative as we are certainly on the same side of the issue but I thought your point deserved a finer definition of the issue which we both agree is that the system is designed for the benefit of teachers and administrators (not to mention politicians). The system needs to be reformed (destroyed) so that the parent's have more control and the political forces have none. In my view, anything short of that and all the money in the world will never improve the system and would more likely continue to erode the education of the students in it.

The single change needed would be to introduce competition by completely replacing public schools with vouchers. It also wouldn't hurt to abolish the Dept. of Education and to outlaw the teachers unions along with all other government employee unions.

"putting the education of the children first" within the context of the public school system will never work. The current system is fundamentally flawed and can never be "done right". The US government was designed to be non-intrusive and minimized to only what is needed. A government-run school system will never teach that there are limits to governmental power. There is an inherent conflict of interest and government-run education will always be a slave to the State, committed to churning out ignorant, compliant drones.

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